SPATZ: There’s not much we can do when we get them in this late, I’m afraid. It’s a standard error of people to wait until the variance is far too large, before bringing it to our attention.

Looks down into his coffee cup.

SPATZ: Some nights, it breaks my heart. Makes me think life’s nothing more than one big scatter plot for us to try and put a best-fit line through. Every time you think you’ve minimized the square of the residuals, some new outlier crops up to throw the whole thing off again. Sometimes… I wonder why I even bother.

INTERN: Because you’re a doctor, dammit, Spatz! Or have you forgotten your own causation? I remember when you used to run DFBETA tests all the time; now, you just throw away the outliers like yesterday’s newspaper.

SPATZ: Maybe you’re right… Maybe you’re right… Nurse, I am straightening up my game. Our relationship has been spurious all along, it’s only your close correlation with Nurse Whimpleton that has made it seem significant.

WILHELM: (gasps)

SPATZ: As for this poor fellow, make sure to check the interaction terms earlier next time.

I actually think it’s reasonably clever. I also resent the willingness of random, anonymous others to step so aggressively into my gadfly role. They’re not so random, of course. You’re anonymous to each other, people, not to the folks with the server logs.

Also, Remember that profanity is generally the sign of a weak mind trying to express itself forcefully.

The conference was outstanding.
I sat on the Terrorism and Insurgency roundtable and a second delegate sat on the Domestic Sources of Influence on Foreign Policy table. The keynote was Bruce Hoffmann and the panel was as expected, horrifyingly self-interested (realists in the truest form I’ve ever seen?)